In this episode Andy explains how a mature Christian invests in certain regular habits that prepare him or her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. So, we’re in the middle of the action section now, which we define as habitual obedience. And this morning we are going to talk about spiritual disciplines, spiritual disciplines.
Now again, with the idea of habit, the idea of a habit is something that we do again and again and develop ability in that area, you could see an athlete practicing. And my mind goes to a specific cold night in September of 1979 at a mostly abandoned hockey rink in Norway. And on that September night, 1979, some hockey players with the letters USA on their uniforms are skating up and down the rink in the dark, doing a brutal skating drill that had most of them on the verge of collapse. This was after they had played a full hockey game. They’d come to a listless tie with the Norway second-best team, and their coach, a real whip cracker named Herb Brooks, was trying to get them ready for great things in the Winter Olympics.
He’d been disgusted with their lackluster performance. And he decided he was going to have them do something called Herbies, which is where they skate, they started at one end of the rink, they skate a quarter of the way up and back, and then halfway up and back three quarters of the way up and back. And then all the way up and back and they just do this again and again until they’re ready to collapse. And this is again, after a full hockey game. And what he was doing was he was training his team with the kind of discipline it would take eventually to beat the Russian hockey team, the greatest hockey team in the world. And go on to win the gold medal. It’s called the Miracle on Ice in 1980, February of 1980. Still talked about 40 years later. And the foundation of it was the discipline that Coach Herb Brooks instilled in the team that night.
It was tough. It was hard. I think anybody that’s had a real hard coach and been involved in a sport, or even somebody who’s had a very disciplined mentor in a musical instrument or something like that understands how difficult those times can be. But also, the foundation of discipline that comes with excellence.
And so, I want to talk about spiritual disciplines, spiritual disciplines. Discipline is absolutely essential to success in the Christian life. Twice the apostle Paul used athletic analogies to prove this point in his epistles. One is in 1 Corinthians 9, he talks about the victor’s crown that went to those that won the top ranking in the Isthmian games, not the Olympic Games, but the Isthmian games, very similar to the Olympics. And Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians 9 talks about the kind of self-discipline that he put himself through so that he could both be a witness for Christ to Jews and Gentiles alike. And also, so that he would not fall into sin through his own lack of holiness, be disqualified from the ministry. He’s really looking at both the internal and external journeys there.
And they come together in a marvelous section in which he talks about athletics. He says, “Don’t you know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain the prize” (1 Corinthians 9:24). And then he says, “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to get a crown that will not last, we do it to get a crown that will last forever, an imperishable crown” (1 Corinthians 9:24). So, the astonishing discipline of an athlete that exercises self-control in all things, that would be diet, strictly watching their diet, sleep patterns, leisure, everything. I think these Olympic athletes are some of the most eccentric people in the world. They do pretty much nothing but their sport, getting ready to excel in their sport. And everything else, all of their family life, their social life, their friendships, everything drops off so that they can hone and perfect their bodies and their minds and their technique so that they can succeed. That’s the kind of discipline Paul is talking about.
And then even more pointedly in 1 Timothy 4:7-8, he says this, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, “Train yourself to be godly; for physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” So, this word train that Paul used there, train yourself for godliness or train yourself to be godly, the Greek word is gymnazo from which we get the word gymnast or gymnastic. And so, he directly contrasts the physical training of an athlete to the training needed for godliness. He does command us to train our bodies, but he said it’s even more important to train our souls for godliness. And so, there is a connection between discipline and godliness.
A mature Christian invests in certain habit patterns on a daily basis that prepare him or her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges.
So how do we do it? How do we train ourselves for godliness? And here we come to the matter of spiritual disciplines. A mature Christian invests in certain habit patterns on a daily basis that prepare him or her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges. So, a Christian stores up the riches of God’s word and the sweetness of fellowship with God in prayer. We talked about this last time, but we’re going to develop it a little more this time in terms of the personal quiet time. A mature Christian has a daily devotional life, a quiet time, a regular pattern of Bible intake and personal worship and prayer. Bible reading and prayer, those two disciplines in particular are the two legs by which we walk or make progress in the internal journey, Bible reading and prayer. So, I tend to think of it this way, Bible reading is God speaking to us, and prayer is us speaking to God. This relationship over the word is vital.
Now in this we want to follow Christ’s example, again, big picture, infinite journey that we’re talking about. The growth into godliness is really, ultimately, conformity to Christ or Christlikeness. And so, in all things we want to conform to Christ. We want to follow Christ’s example. And isn’t it fascinating that Jesus Christ, while he lived on earth, had a regular pattern of time with his heavenly Father. Regularly, consistently set the example of what we would call a daily quiet time. For example, in Mark 1:35 it said, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place where he prayed.” He continued this habit throughout his busy ministry. In Luke 5:16, it says, “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
So, Jesus’s prayer life prepared him daily for his perfect works of service to God. He stressed that he did nothing apart from the expressed will and command of his father. And the indication is that Jesus arose early every morning and prayed to get effectively his marching orders from his father for the day. Isaiah gave us a prophecy about this, I think, in an amazing way, Isaiah 50:4-5, listen to these words and think about Jesus. This is effectively Jesus speaking here through Isaiah, “The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue,” so the Sovereign Lord, that’d be God the Father. So, you can think of it that way, “God, the Father, has given me,” Jesus, “An instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.” “The Sovereign Lord, that’s God the Father, “has opened my ears,” that’s Jesus’s ears, “The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back.”
That is the inner workings of the quiet time Jesus would have every day with his heavenly Father. The Father would open his ears, he would tell him what he wanted to say or do. Jesus listened. He said, “I will obey,” and he went off and did it. I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be great to live our lives like that? To have that kind of a quiet time, to have that kind of intimacy with God. Morning by morning the heavenly Father wakened Jesus. Morning by morning he spoke his words and his will into the willing ears of his perfect Son. And with this private time Jesus gained an instructed tongue filled with messages from God to sustain the weary and those that are burdened by sin. And he obeyed whatever the Father told him to do.
As he said in John 14:10, “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me who is doing his work.” The cumulative weight of evidence is that Jesus, it seems, woke early every morning, went to some solitary place and prayed. During that time, he heard clearly from his Father what he was to do that day, and he went and did it.
Similarly, we see two other aspects of Jesus’s disciplines in his time of testing in the desert, scripture intake and fasting. The scriptural side of Jesus’ devotional life comes out in the three passages from Deuteronomy that he quoted from memory when fighting the devil’s temptations. For example, Deuteronomy 8:3, he said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He was able to resist the temptation of turning the stones into bread by Scripture he had memorized.
And the two other quotations from Matthew 4 also come from Deuteronomy as well. So, the evidence is that Jesus had stored up God’s word in his heart, he had memorized it, he had meditated on it. He knew it completely and well. We also see fasting. Jesus was out in the desert for 40 days fasting, and so he was in total control of his appetites. Yet for all of that, he was not an ascetic, like John was. John was out in the desert, ate locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist was clearly not in the world for luxuries. He was clearly not in the world to eat the finest foods. He was there to do the will of God. Jesus reclined at table frequently. He feasted a lot. He was with tax collectors and sinners. That was a regular pattern of his life. He was not a glutton or a drunkard, though they said he was, because of this pattern of feasting that he had. He was actually in total control of his appetites. And that 40 day fast, the greatest in history, is clear evidence of it.
So, we see Jesus’s pattern of spiritual disciplines, so regular prayer, Bible intake, and even fasting. So, for us, we need to have a daily quiet time. That’s a foundation of your growth as a Christian. And it all starts with Bible intake. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. You need a steady intake, a steady diet of scripture. And this has never been easier. We are rich in the English language. We have, I don’t know, I don’t even know how many, between 7 to 10, very famous, well-known and excellently done translations of the Bible. When I was a missionary in Japan, they only had two translations of the Bible from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Japanese, and they were very old translations. Japanese Christians tell me that it’s actually very hard Japanese to read. But there’s just not enough money or resources it seemed to do a modern and new translation into the Japanese language.
But in America, in the English-speaking world, there’s a new translation it seems every five to seven years, something like that. We are lavishly blessed with Biblical resources. We’re lavishly blessed with electronic resources, podcasts like this one, all kinds of ways so we can get Bible intake. But above that, and beyond that, obviously we need to attend church and be hearing regularly the preaching of God’s word. But we need to be in the word ourselves, you need to be reading the Bible. I would also recommend a pattern, a combination pattern for you of reading through the Bible in a year and memorizing books of the Bible. I would challenge you to do that, to think about that. Memorizing books of the Bible gives you knowledge and depth, and reading through the Bible in a year gives you knowledge and breadth.
George Muller read through the Bible, I think the entire Bible almost a hundred times. That’s incredible to me. So that would be at the rate of twice a year, like every six months he went through the entire Bible. So that’d be about 30 minutes of just simply reading. But I also would commend, maybe, I don’t know that you have to go through the Bible a hundred times in your lifetime, but just a consistent pattern of reading through the 66 books of the Bible. And then choose a New Testament epistle like Ephesians or Philippians, something like that, and hide God’s word in your heart, this will give you knowledge and depth. This combination of breadth and depth is a beautiful pattern of Bible intake. So, I would commend this to you.
Now, George Muller probably is one of the greatest examples of the power of a daily quiet time. And he said, and I kind of alluded to this in the last podcast but listen to what he says. George Mueller talks about his daily quiet time and specifically the purpose of the quiet time.
This is a George Mueller quote:
I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state and how my inner man might be nourished. The most important thing I had to do then was to give myself to the reading of the word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed. And that thus whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord. I began therefore to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning, early in the morning.
The Holy Spirit illuminates God’s word. It’s just black marks on a page until the Spirit lifts it up off the page and causes it to some degree come to life in your mind.
And so, George Mueller zeroed in on the daily quiet time as essential to his spiritual health. And he’s reading the scripture, not as water goes through a pipe, but he’s reading and pausing and pondering and chewing over things that the Holy Spirit lifts out of the text, meditating on it, and then continuing. I love praying what Psalm 119:18 says, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.” Isn’t that a great thing to pray before a quiet time? “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law,” that seeing of wonderful things implies things you hadn’t seen before. This is what we call the illumination by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit illuminates God’s word. It’s just black marks on a page until the Spirit lifts it up off the page and causes it to some degree come to life in your mind. And you get it. You have this aha moment. The eyes of your heart are enlightened so that you can see spiritual truth. You should have that in every quiet time, at least some of that in every quiet time.
So, “Open my eyes, that I may see wonderful things in your life.” Actually, Psalm 119, I would commend it to you as a marvelous pattern of the very thing we’re talking about here, which is a combination of Bible intake and prayer. Psalm 119 is 176 verses in which the psalmist is basically celebrating, in prayer, the greatness of the word of God, the written word of God. He’s celebrating it. And it’s in prayer because almost every verse mentions Scripture, the law of God, the word of God, and almost every verse is written in the second person, you this, you that, you the other. It’s a prayer. It’s a prayer to God over the Scripture.
And in Psalm 119, the Psalmist gives us certain patterns of meditation. Such as Psalm 119:99, “I have more insight than all my teachers for I meditate on your statutes.” Or again, listen to this one, Psalm 119:27, “Let me understand the teaching of your precepts, then I will meditate on your wonders.” Isn’t that incredible? “Let me understand and then I’ll meditate.” Now, Psalm 119:99 teaches something we would expect, “I meditate and therefore I have insight.” But Psalm 119:27 reverses the order, it effectively says, “I understand therefore I meditate.”
So the way I put it together is, look, you just start reading Scripture and you pause and meditate. You think about what’s happening, and then aha moments happen, illumination, understanding. That illumination excites you, interests you, makes you excited about studying God’s word and you go back into more meditation again. It’s a big cycle. So, meditation produces illumination or insight and insight produces more meditation, produces more work, it’s a cycle by which you can grow in your knowledge of God’s word. And you would just dig in and continue to store up God’s word in your heart.
Now, memorization, scripture memorization is something I’ve given myself to a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time on memorization. And frankly, the book that we’re studying in the Sanctification Monday podcast, An Infinite Journey is basically the fruit of years of memorization that’s produced and insights on sanctification. That’s where it’s come from. And so, I would commend to you the memorization of whole books of the Bible.
Now, if you were to ask me what Scripture verse would you point to that would urge me to memorize, there are a lot. Psalm 119:9 says, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word?” And then 119:11 says, “Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you.” That’d be a good one. But my favorite is John 15:7, it says, “If you remain in me,” Jesus says this to us, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, then ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you.”
So, here’s my question, how can Jesus’s words, plural, his nouns and verbs and adjectives, how can they remain or dwell or abide in you if you don’t memorize them? So, I don’t think you have to memorize, but you have to not forget God’s word. And if you push it enough, not forgetting might be kind of similar to if not the same as memorizing. So, I would just commend to you the discipline, the discipline of memorization of Scripture.
Now, I think it is good to memorize individual verses like John 3:16 or some other verses, but I think it’s better to memorize whole books. And I’ve written a booklet entitled An Approach to the Extended Memorization of Scripture, which you can get through the Two Journeys website or through First Baptist Church’s site, or you can get it on amazon.com and it will give you certain techniques or approaches to memorization of extended portions of the Bible.
Now, beyond Bible intake, there’s personal prayer. We need to give ourselves to prayer. This is a habitual action, an action of habitual obedience. We need to, as Jesus said, in the Sermon of the Mount, go into the room, our room, close the door, and pray to our Father who’s unseen. There is immense value to this pattern of praying alone with the heavenly Father (Matthew 6:6). And also, as 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says, “Pray without ceasing.” So, praying throughout the day, I would commend both. So, a dedicated focused prayer time, that would be part of your quiet time. And then just praying as you walk along the road, no matter what’s going on, just praying.
Now, years ago someone taught me the acronym, and maybe you’ve heard it and maybe you’re using it and maybe you’ve never heard of it, but it’s A-C-T-S Adoration Confession Thanksgiving Supplication. So in your private prayer time, I would commend that you spend some time in adoration, worship, you spend some time in confession of sin, spend some time thanking God for his many blessings, and then in supplication, for other Christians, for your family, for your church, your pastors, for other people that you know, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. So, Bible intake and prayer, these are the basic spiritual disciplines of the Christian life.
Now, there are some other disciplines as well. My friend Don Whitney has written a book, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. I would commend it. It’s an excellent book, a good guide to spiritual disciplines. But disciplines that we’ve already mentioned, fasting, journaling, silence sometimes, there are other types of disciplines such as solitude, but the primary ones, both Don Whitney and I would agree, are Bible intake and prayer. So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experience this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections, knowledge, faith, character, and action. So, we’re in the middle of the action section now, which we define as habitual obedience. And this morning we are going to talk about spiritual disciplines, spiritual disciplines.
Now again, with the idea of habit, the idea of a habit is something that we do again and again and develop ability in that area, you could see an athlete practicing. And my mind goes to a specific cold night in September of 1979 at a mostly abandoned hockey rink in Norway. And on that September night, 1979, some hockey players with the letters USA on their uniforms are skating up and down the rink in the dark, doing a brutal skating drill that had most of them on the verge of collapse. This was after they had played a full hockey game. They’d come to a listless tie with the Norway second-best team, and their coach, a real whip cracker named Herb Brooks, was trying to get them ready for great things in the Winter Olympics.
He’d been disgusted with their lackluster performance. And he decided he was going to have them do something called Herbies, which is where they skate, they started at one end of the rink, they skate a quarter of the way up and back, and then halfway up and back three quarters of the way up and back. And then all the way up and back and they just do this again and again until they’re ready to collapse. And this is again, after a full hockey game. And what he was doing was he was training his team with the kind of discipline it would take eventually to beat the Russian hockey team, the greatest hockey team in the world. And go on to win the gold medal. It’s called the Miracle on Ice in 1980, February of 1980. Still talked about 40 years later. And the foundation of it was the discipline that Coach Herb Brooks instilled in the team that night.
It was tough. It was hard. I think anybody that’s had a real hard coach and been involved in a sport, or even somebody who’s had a very disciplined mentor in a musical instrument or something like that understands how difficult those times can be. But also, the foundation of discipline that comes with excellence.
And so, I want to talk about spiritual disciplines, spiritual disciplines. Discipline is absolutely essential to success in the Christian life. Twice the apostle Paul used athletic analogies to prove this point in his epistles. One is in 1 Corinthians 9, he talks about the victor’s crown that went to those that won the top ranking in the Isthmian games, not the Olympic Games, but the Isthmian games, very similar to the Olympics. And Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians 9 talks about the kind of self-discipline that he put himself through so that he could both be a witness for Christ to Jews and Gentiles alike. And also, so that he would not fall into sin through his own lack of holiness, be disqualified from the ministry. He’s really looking at both the internal and external journeys there.
And they come together in a marvelous section in which he talks about athletics. He says, “Don’t you know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain the prize” (1 Corinthians 9:24). And then he says, “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to get a crown that will not last, we do it to get a crown that will last forever, an imperishable crown” (1 Corinthians 9:24). So, the astonishing discipline of an athlete that exercises self-control in all things, that would be diet, strictly watching their diet, sleep patterns, leisure, everything. I think these Olympic athletes are some of the most eccentric people in the world. They do pretty much nothing but their sport, getting ready to excel in their sport. And everything else, all of their family life, their social life, their friendships, everything drops off so that they can hone and perfect their bodies and their minds and their technique so that they can succeed. That’s the kind of discipline Paul is talking about.
And then even more pointedly in 1 Timothy 4:7-8, he says this, 1 Timothy 4:7-8, “Train yourself to be godly; for physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” So, this word train that Paul used there, train yourself for godliness or train yourself to be godly, the Greek word is gymnazo from which we get the word gymnast or gymnastic. And so, he directly contrasts the physical training of an athlete to the training needed for godliness. He does command us to train our bodies, but he said it’s even more important to train our souls for godliness. And so, there is a connection between discipline and godliness.
A mature Christian invests in certain habit patterns on a daily basis that prepare him or her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges.
So how do we do it? How do we train ourselves for godliness? And here we come to the matter of spiritual disciplines. A mature Christian invests in certain habit patterns on a daily basis that prepare him or her for maximum fruitfulness in facing the day’s challenges. So, a Christian stores up the riches of God’s word and the sweetness of fellowship with God in prayer. We talked about this last time, but we’re going to develop it a little more this time in terms of the personal quiet time. A mature Christian has a daily devotional life, a quiet time, a regular pattern of Bible intake and personal worship and prayer. Bible reading and prayer, those two disciplines in particular are the two legs by which we walk or make progress in the internal journey, Bible reading and prayer. So, I tend to think of it this way, Bible reading is God speaking to us, and prayer is us speaking to God. This relationship over the word is vital.
Now in this we want to follow Christ’s example, again, big picture, infinite journey that we’re talking about. The growth into godliness is really, ultimately, conformity to Christ or Christlikeness. And so, in all things we want to conform to Christ. We want to follow Christ’s example. And isn’t it fascinating that Jesus Christ, while he lived on earth, had a regular pattern of time with his heavenly Father. Regularly, consistently set the example of what we would call a daily quiet time. For example, in Mark 1:35 it said, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place where he prayed.” He continued this habit throughout his busy ministry. In Luke 5:16, it says, “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
So, Jesus’s prayer life prepared him daily for his perfect works of service to God. He stressed that he did nothing apart from the expressed will and command of his father. And the indication is that Jesus arose early every morning and prayed to get effectively his marching orders from his father for the day. Isaiah gave us a prophecy about this, I think, in an amazing way, Isaiah 50:4-5, listen to these words and think about Jesus. This is effectively Jesus speaking here through Isaiah, “The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue,” so the Sovereign Lord, that’d be God the Father. So, you can think of it that way, “God, the Father, has given me,” Jesus, “An instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught.” “The Sovereign Lord, that’s God the Father, “has opened my ears,” that’s Jesus’s ears, “The Sovereign Lord has opened my ears, and I have not been rebellious; I have not drawn back.”
That is the inner workings of the quiet time Jesus would have every day with his heavenly Father. The Father would open his ears, he would tell him what he wanted to say or do. Jesus listened. He said, “I will obey,” and he went off and did it. I’m thinking, wouldn’t it be great to live our lives like that? To have that kind of a quiet time, to have that kind of intimacy with God. Morning by morning the heavenly Father wakened Jesus. Morning by morning he spoke his words and his will into the willing ears of his perfect Son. And with this private time Jesus gained an instructed tongue filled with messages from God to sustain the weary and those that are burdened by sin. And he obeyed whatever the Father told him to do.
As he said in John 14:10, “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me who is doing his work.” The cumulative weight of evidence is that Jesus, it seems, woke early every morning, went to some solitary place and prayed. During that time, he heard clearly from his Father what he was to do that day, and he went and did it.
Similarly, we see two other aspects of Jesus’s disciplines in his time of testing in the desert, scripture intake and fasting. The scriptural side of Jesus’ devotional life comes out in the three passages from Deuteronomy that he quoted from memory when fighting the devil’s temptations. For example, Deuteronomy 8:3, he said, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He was able to resist the temptation of turning the stones into bread by Scripture he had memorized.
And the two other quotations from Matthew 4 also come from Deuteronomy as well. So, the evidence is that Jesus had stored up God’s word in his heart, he had memorized it, he had meditated on it. He knew it completely and well. We also see fasting. Jesus was out in the desert for 40 days fasting, and so he was in total control of his appetites. Yet for all of that, he was not an ascetic, like John was. John was out in the desert, ate locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist was clearly not in the world for luxuries. He was clearly not in the world to eat the finest foods. He was there to do the will of God. Jesus reclined at table frequently. He feasted a lot. He was with tax collectors and sinners. That was a regular pattern of his life. He was not a glutton or a drunkard, though they said he was, because of this pattern of feasting that he had. He was actually in total control of his appetites. And that 40 day fast, the greatest in history, is clear evidence of it.
So, we see Jesus’s pattern of spiritual disciplines, so regular prayer, Bible intake, and even fasting. So, for us, we need to have a daily quiet time. That’s a foundation of your growth as a Christian. And it all starts with Bible intake. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. You need a steady intake, a steady diet of scripture. And this has never been easier. We are rich in the English language. We have, I don’t know, I don’t even know how many, between 7 to 10, very famous, well-known and excellently done translations of the Bible. When I was a missionary in Japan, they only had two translations of the Bible from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into Japanese, and they were very old translations. Japanese Christians tell me that it’s actually very hard Japanese to read. But there’s just not enough money or resources it seemed to do a modern and new translation into the Japanese language.
But in America, in the English-speaking world, there’s a new translation it seems every five to seven years, something like that. We are lavishly blessed with Biblical resources. We’re lavishly blessed with electronic resources, podcasts like this one, all kinds of ways so we can get Bible intake. But above that, and beyond that, obviously we need to attend church and be hearing regularly the preaching of God’s word. But we need to be in the word ourselves, you need to be reading the Bible. I would also recommend a pattern, a combination pattern for you of reading through the Bible in a year and memorizing books of the Bible. I would challenge you to do that, to think about that. Memorizing books of the Bible gives you knowledge and depth, and reading through the Bible in a year gives you knowledge and breadth.
George Muller read through the Bible, I think the entire Bible almost a hundred times. That’s incredible to me. So that would be at the rate of twice a year, like every six months he went through the entire Bible. So that’d be about 30 minutes of just simply reading. But I also would commend, maybe, I don’t know that you have to go through the Bible a hundred times in your lifetime, but just a consistent pattern of reading through the 66 books of the Bible. And then choose a New Testament epistle like Ephesians or Philippians, something like that, and hide God’s word in your heart, this will give you knowledge and depth. This combination of breadth and depth is a beautiful pattern of Bible intake. So, I would commend this to you.
Now, George Muller probably is one of the greatest examples of the power of a daily quiet time. And he said, and I kind of alluded to this in the last podcast but listen to what he says. George Mueller talks about his daily quiet time and specifically the purpose of the quiet time.
This is a George Mueller quote:
I saw more clearly than ever that the first great and primary business to which I ought to attend every day was to have my soul happy in the Lord. The first thing to be concerned about was not how much I might serve the Lord or how I might glorify the Lord, but how I might get my soul into a happy state and how my inner man might be nourished. The most important thing I had to do then was to give myself to the reading of the word of God and to meditation on it, that thus my heart might be comforted, encouraged, warned, reproved, instructed. And that thus whilst meditating, my heart might be brought into experimental communion with the Lord. I began therefore to meditate on the New Testament from the beginning, early in the morning.
The Holy Spirit illuminates God’s word. It’s just black marks on a page until the Spirit lifts it up off the page and causes it to some degree come to life in your mind.
And so, George Mueller zeroed in on the daily quiet time as essential to his spiritual health. And he’s reading the scripture, not as water goes through a pipe, but he’s reading and pausing and pondering and chewing over things that the Holy Spirit lifts out of the text, meditating on it, and then continuing. I love praying what Psalm 119:18 says, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.” Isn’t that a great thing to pray before a quiet time? “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law,” that seeing of wonderful things implies things you hadn’t seen before. This is what we call the illumination by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit illuminates God’s word. It’s just black marks on a page until the Spirit lifts it up off the page and causes it to some degree come to life in your mind. And you get it. You have this aha moment. The eyes of your heart are enlightened so that you can see spiritual truth. You should have that in every quiet time, at least some of that in every quiet time.
So, “Open my eyes, that I may see wonderful things in your life.” Actually, Psalm 119, I would commend it to you as a marvelous pattern of the very thing we’re talking about here, which is a combination of Bible intake and prayer. Psalm 119 is 176 verses in which the psalmist is basically celebrating, in prayer, the greatness of the word of God, the written word of God. He’s celebrating it. And it’s in prayer because almost every verse mentions Scripture, the law of God, the word of God, and almost every verse is written in the second person, you this, you that, you the other. It’s a prayer. It’s a prayer to God over the Scripture.
And in Psalm 119, the Psalmist gives us certain patterns of meditation. Such as Psalm 119:99, “I have more insight than all my teachers for I meditate on your statutes.” Or again, listen to this one, Psalm 119:27, “Let me understand the teaching of your precepts, then I will meditate on your wonders.” Isn’t that incredible? “Let me understand and then I’ll meditate.” Now, Psalm 119:99 teaches something we would expect, “I meditate and therefore I have insight.” But Psalm 119:27 reverses the order, it effectively says, “I understand therefore I meditate.”
So the way I put it together is, look, you just start reading Scripture and you pause and meditate. You think about what’s happening, and then aha moments happen, illumination, understanding. That illumination excites you, interests you, makes you excited about studying God’s word and you go back into more meditation again. It’s a big cycle. So, meditation produces illumination or insight and insight produces more meditation, produces more work, it’s a cycle by which you can grow in your knowledge of God’s word. And you would just dig in and continue to store up God’s word in your heart.
Now, memorization, scripture memorization is something I’ve given myself to a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time on memorization. And frankly, the book that we’re studying in the Sanctification Monday podcast, An Infinite Journey is basically the fruit of years of memorization that’s produced and insights on sanctification. That’s where it’s come from. And so, I would commend to you the memorization of whole books of the Bible.
Now, if you were to ask me what Scripture verse would you point to that would urge me to memorize, there are a lot. Psalm 119:9 says, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By living according to your word?” And then 119:11 says, “Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you.” That’d be a good one. But my favorite is John 15:7, it says, “If you remain in me,” Jesus says this to us, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, then ask whatever you wish, and it will be given to you.”
So, here’s my question, how can Jesus’s words, plural, his nouns and verbs and adjectives, how can they remain or dwell or abide in you if you don’t memorize them? So, I don’t think you have to memorize, but you have to not forget God’s word. And if you push it enough, not forgetting might be kind of similar to if not the same as memorizing. So, I would just commend to you the discipline, the discipline of memorization of Scripture.
Now, I think it is good to memorize individual verses like John 3:16 or some other verses, but I think it’s better to memorize whole books. And I’ve written a booklet entitled An Approach to the Extended Memorization of Scripture, which you can get through the Two Journeys website or through First Baptist Church’s site, or you can get it on amazon.com and it will give you certain techniques or approaches to memorization of extended portions of the Bible.
Now, beyond Bible intake, there’s personal prayer. We need to give ourselves to prayer. This is a habitual action, an action of habitual obedience. We need to, as Jesus said, in the Sermon of the Mount, go into the room, our room, close the door, and pray to our Father who’s unseen. There is immense value to this pattern of praying alone with the heavenly Father (Matthew 6:6). And also, as 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says, “Pray without ceasing.” So, praying throughout the day, I would commend both. So, a dedicated focused prayer time, that would be part of your quiet time. And then just praying as you walk along the road, no matter what’s going on, just praying.
Now, years ago someone taught me the acronym, and maybe you’ve heard it and maybe you’re using it and maybe you’ve never heard of it, but it’s A-C-T-S Adoration Confession Thanksgiving Supplication. So in your private prayer time, I would commend that you spend some time in adoration, worship, you spend some time in confession of sin, spend some time thanking God for his many blessings, and then in supplication, for other Christians, for your family, for your church, your pastors, for other people that you know, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. So, Bible intake and prayer, these are the basic spiritual disciplines of the Christian life.
Now, there are some other disciplines as well. My friend Don Whitney has written a book, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. I would commend it. It’s an excellent book, a good guide to spiritual disciplines. But disciplines that we’ve already mentioned, fasting, journaling, silence sometimes, there are other types of disciplines such as solitude, but the primary ones, both Don Whitney and I would agree, are Bible intake and prayer. So, as we conclude today, go into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything you experience this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.
